James Smith (1737–1812 or 1814) was a frontiersman, farmer and soldier in British North America. In 1765, he led the "Black Boys", a group of Pennsylvania men, in a nine-month rebellion against British rule, ten years before the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War. He participated in the war as a colonel of the Pennsylvania militia and was a legislator in the Kentucky General Assembly. Smith was also an author, publishing his analysis of Native American ways of fighting in Narrative in 1799.